The Sword of Goujian (Chinese: 越王勾践剑; pinyin: Yuèwáng Gōujiàn jiàn)[1] is a tin bronze sword, renowned for its unusual sharpness, intricate design and resistance to tarnish rarely seen in artifacts of similar age. The sword is generally attributed to Goujian, one of the last kings of Yue during the Spring and Autumn period.
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In 1965, the sword was found in an ancient tomb in Hubei. It is currently in the possession of the Hubei Provincial Museum. In 1994, the sword was damaged by a worker while on loan to Singapore, since then China has forbidden the sword to be exhibited abroad.
More than 2,000 artifacts were recovered from the sites, including an ornate bronze sword, found inside a casket together with a human skeleton. The casket was discovered in December 1965, at Wangshan site #1, 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) from the ruins of Ying, currently called Jinancheng 纪南), an ancient capital of Chu.
The sword was found sheathed in a wooden scabbard finished in black lacquer. The scabbard had an almost air-tight fit with the sword body. Unsheathing the sword revealed an untarnished blade, despite the tomb being soaked in underground water for over 2,000 years. [2]
From the sword's origin in 510 BC to the kingdom's demise at the hands of the Chu in 334 BC, nine kings ruled Yue, including Goujian, Lu Cheng, Bu Shou, and Zhu Gou. The identity of the king named in the sword inscription sparked debate among archeologists and Chinese language scholars. The discussion was carried out mostly via letter, and involved famous scholars such as Guo Moruo. After more than two months, the experts[who?] started to form a consensus that the original owner of the sword was Goujian (勾踐), the King of Yue made famous by his perseverance in time of hardship.
The sword of Goujian is 55.6 centimetres (21.9 in) in length, including an 8.4 centimetres (3.3 in) hilt; the blade is 4.6 centimetres (1.8 in) wide at its base. The sword weighs 875 grams (30.9 oz). In addition to the repeating dark rhombi pattern on both sides of the blade, there are decorations of blue crystals and turquoise. The grip of the sword is bound by silk, while the pommel is composed of eleven concentric circles.
The Sword of Goujian still has a sharp blade and shows no signs of tarnish. To understand why, scientists at Fudan University and CAS used modern equipment to determine the chemical composition of the sword, as shown in the table below.
While on loan to Singapore for display as part of a cultural exchange exhibition in 1994, a worker accidentally bumped the sword against the case, resulting in a 7-millimetre (0.28 in) crack on the sword. Since then, China has not allowed the sword to be taken out of the country, and in 2013 officially placed the sword onto the list of Chinese cultural relics forbidden to be exhibited abroad.[3]
If someone's coming at you with a sword, you wear sword-proof clothing. Duh. It's not like soldiers gave up plate armor randomly or because the fashion changed; they did it because cannons started exploding the hell out of them, metal codpieces and all.
Before gunpowder ruined everything, armored knights and men-at-arms were basically walking Colossuses. Like, the Marvel kind. Because whether it was a full suit of plate armor or even the skimpier chainmail of foot soldiers, swords, and axes, much like your boyfriend after he's been drinking, just couldn't penetrate. Hacking and slashing and pounding isn't going to do shit against metal, no matter how big your sword is. A knight in full plate armor could even survive getting trampled by a horse.
Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings movies had swords and axes and sharpened sticks going through helmets and armor all the time. So did Braveheart in the earlier clip. 2019's The King has Timothée Chalamet punching metal barehanded over and over again without breaking his knuckles, while also stabbing through chainmail. In fact, a museum curator watching movie fight scenes was basically screaming, "You can't stab someone through armor!" for a full 20 minutes.
From He-Man to Conan to Wonder Woman and her God Killer blade, swords are everyone's go-to Ultimate Weapon. This all, obviously, stems from the original super blade, King Arthur's Excalibur. The problem, though, is that swords weren't quite as singular the weapon in the Middle Ages as you might think. Let's start with the fact that, like everything else about knights, swords were expensive. While your run-of-the-mill man-at-arms might get one in a war, swords were, for long stretches of time, a symbol of nobility. They were status symbols, like owning a jaguar, or a Jaguar, or the Jacksonville Jaguars.
That's because the primary purpose of these weapons was to incapacitate rather than kill. A brawler would use his sword or his halberd to knock a dude down, then rush in and use a smaller blade to stab him through gaps in his armor. Meaning that daggers were, proportionally, the most deadly weapon.
After his horse got stuck in the mud at the Battle of Bosworth Field, King Richard III was forcibly dismounted, had his helmet ripped off, and was then stabbed in the face and the back of his head simultaneously, by a sword and a halberd, all while having part of his skull sawed off by some mystery weapon, too. Then the king was stripped of his armor and clothing and sodomized by a dagger. And then he died.
When he went to check out what was happening, he saw two women outside the home, pointing towards the porch where the victim was with a sword through his chest. By the time police arrived, Karl Winn was dead, according to court documents.
Responding officers found Aaron Winn inside a bedroom and he was taken into custody. As he was being escorted out of the house, he told police the sword belonged to his brother and that he had committed suicide. Police originally labeled his death as suspicious.
The sword looks fairly ordinary at first glance. Weighing in at 2 lbs., 10 ounces (1.2 kilograms) and measuring 38 inches (964 millimeters) long, the weapon is steel, with a double edge and a hilt shaped like a cross. But on one side of the sword is a mysterious inscription, made by gold wire that has been inlaid into the steel, which reads, "+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+." [The 7 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth]
Is the message some kind of magical incantation, meant to empower the weapon's owner with mystical abilities during battle? Perhaps the inscription is a religious blessing, or maybe it's just the complicated signature of whoever forged the weapon. Those who read the British Library's blog post put these and many other theories forward regarding the sword's enigmatic message.
Dozens of commenters chimed in to help solve the mystery. And luckily, one of those commenters had a lot of insight into the history of inscribed swords in Europe. Marc van Hasselt, a graduate student of medieval studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has studied similarly inscribed swords and said that these weapons were "all the rage" in 13th-century Europe. The British Library recently updated its blog post with more information from van Hasselt.
Many inscribed swords have been found in countries including Poland, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, making the River Witham sword "part of a large international family," according to van Hasselt.
In 2006, researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden (as well as several other institutions) started the Fyris Swords Project, a research project dedicated to figuring out the historical context in which these inscribed medieval swords were used.
The River Witham sword was forged in Germany, which was then the blade-making center of Europe, according to the British Museum. And pre-Christian Germanic tribesman inscribed runes onto their swords, axes and armor to "endow the items with magical powers," the Fyris Swords Project researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Waffen- und Kostümkunde (Weaponry and Costumes) in 2009.
Such swords were likely owned by wealthy warriors, according to the British Museum, which speculates that the River Witham sword belonged to a knight or some other rich individual who rode into battle during the crusades of the late medieval period. The British Museum also suggests that such swords may have been a part of the ceremony in which a man became a knight and vowed to defend the church.
Even though historians are fairly certain why inscribed swords were popular in the medieval period and who owned them, they still aren't sure just what these swords actually say. Interpreting the inscriptions on the blades is like "trying to crack a mysterious code," according to the Fyris Swords Project researchers.
While historians aren't entirely sure what language the letters on the sword represent, they are fairly certain that the letters are a short-form version of Latin, according to van Hasselt, who said that Latin was the "international language of choice" in 13th-century Europe. The first two letters on the River Witham sword are ND, which van Hasselt said might be a kind of invocation that stands for "Nostrum Dominus (our Lord) or Nomine Domini (name of the Lord)."
This sort of speculation about what the sword's inscriptions might represent has been going on for more than a century (researchers have been publishing their interpretations of the inscriptions in the journal Waffen- und Kostümkunde since 1904). The variety of the letter sequences on the swords makes it clear that the inscriptions are not general statements (i.e., a standard blessing written out in short form). Quite the opposite is true, according to the researchers.
"[The] inscriptions (even though sometimes showing a constancy of letters) are extremely variable and appear to be very personal. One might say the individual secret of every sword bearer. It must have been a special dictum [saying] so obvious and so self-evident to him that it was not necessary to spell out its significant meaning," the researchers said. 2ff7e9595c
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